Australia’s social media ban for under-16s is sold as child protection, but its most tangible effect is a transfer of power away from global platforms and back to legacy media interests.

When the South Australian Malinauskas Government first floated the idea of banning under-16s from social media, the political choreography was unusually smooth. Within months it had leaped from a state-level trial balloon to federal Labor policy, eagerly embraced by a prime minister who normally prefers consultation to crusades. Commentators framed it as a bold stand for child safety. Parents were invited to picture Facebook and TikTok as digital cigarette machines being wheeled out of reach.

But beneath the moral panic lies a quieter truth: there is no contemporary policy domain where the interests of News Corp are so perfectly aligned with the language of public virtue. A ban on teens is not simply a restriction on tech platforms. It is a structural transfer of power – political, cultural, and above all commercial – back to the traditional media giants who have been waging a decade-long war against the global platforms that disrupted their dominance.

This is the real story of Australia’s under-16s social media ban: a victory not for children, but for News Corp’s balance sheet.

For years, News Corp has framed Silicon Valley as an existential threat – to journalism, to democracy, and to civilisation itself. That framing wasn’t entirely wrong, but it was never disinterested. Social media platforms displaced News Corp’s advertising revenues, diluted its cultural reach, and weakened its ability to set national agendas. Murdoch’s solution was not reinvention but retribution: a sustained political offensive to hobble the platforms through regulation, taxation and public alarm.

Child safety is the perfect battleground. It mobilises fear, generates cross-partisan sympathy, and creates a moral force-field that shields policy from scrutiny. You can dissent from a cyber-safety narrative without being labelled pro-tech; but you cannot dissent from child-safety messaging without being accused of endangering children. The political genius of the initiative lies here: a reform driven by commercial advantage is sold as a crusade of protection.

And Canberra, for reasons of its own, has been willing to play along.

A ban on teens does almost nothing to improve the digital environment. The evidence base is selectively interpreted and deeply contested. The enforcement mechanisms are unproven. The unintended consequences – pushing teenagers onto encrypted or unregulated platforms, isolating vulnerable youth, undermining opportunities for civic and creative participation – are ignored.

But what the ban does do is weaken the business model of the platforms most threatening to News Corp’s dominance.

Remove teenagers and you reduce scale. Reduce scale and you reduce advertising value. Reduce advertising value and you reduce political power.

Every parent who steers their child towards ‘verified, curated, trusted’ content will in practice be funnelled toward traditional news, television, and subscription services. We’ve been here before: panic over online predators in the mid-2000s drove families back to cable news and commercial broadcasting. What is old is new again.

Even its designers know the policy will be porous. Teenagers can evade bans. VPNs exist. Verification regimes fail. The practical outcome will not be the removal of under-16s from the digital world but a redirection of public funding, regulatory effort, and political legitimacy away from global platforms and toward a domestic media sector that has mastered the art of lobbying through moral narrative.

And this is why the policy is so politically potent: it doesn’t need to work to achieve its underlying objective.

A ban that nudges parents away from TikTok toward commercial news reinforces the existing power hierarchy. A ban that deepens the political wedge between government and Silicon Valley makes it easier for traditional media to dictate terms in future negotiations over regulation, competition policy and tax regimes. A ban that normalises punitive rather than developmental responses to youth online behaviour ensures that the conversation stays on terrain advantageous to legacy media – fear, surveillance, and control.

News Corp doesn’t need teenagers to stop using social media. It only needs governments to keep treating social media as the problem.

The Malinauskas Government, whether knowingly or not, has delivered News Corp something priceless: a global precedent. No liberal democracy has yet imposed a categorical age ban on social media use. If Australia does it first, it becomes the proof-of-concept for a model that other anxious governments may emulate – and other media conglomerates will lobby to replicate.

The ironies abound.

A state founded as a radical experiment in rights, dissent and civic participation has now provided the template for a policy whose primary beneficiaries are the most concentrated media corporation in the democratic world. A government elected on promises of openness, inclusion and evidence has gifted a commercial victory to a company whose business strategy increasingly depends on public alarm. And a younger generation already marginalised by housing precarity, low wages, and narrowing civic belonging is now told that their very presence online is a threat requiring government restriction.

If the goal were genuinely child safety, governments would be investing in digital literacy, youth mental health, school-based supports, platform design standards, privacy regulation, and community-level resilience – the slow, devolved, human-centred work that strengthens capability rather than restricting autonomy.

Instead, we have a ban with excellent headlines, negligible efficacy, and profound commercial implications.

It is not a child-protection policy. It is a media power policy, wrapped in moral language, executed with bipartisan ease.

And as long as News Corp can keep convincing governments that the platforms are the problem and it is the solution, the victories will keep coming.

Australia’s children deserve better than being used as the pretext for a turf war in which the only real winners are already the most powerful players in the media landscape.